// Morning!
Happy Nvidia Earnings Day to all who celebrate. They crushed (again).
And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by founders, CEOs, execs, and scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzzwords, no bullshit.
While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:
🎧 Want the whole vibe? The running playlist is right here.
From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…
The Signal
One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.
AI Search Is Quietly Rewiring How People Find You
The headlines are everywhere: Google is dead, GEO is everything, blue links rest in peace.
Yada, Yada, Yada. We get it.
The more interesting question, in my opinion, is:
A huge chunk of your future traffic is already moving through channels you probably aren’t watching.
Let me show you what I’ve been digging into.
1. Consumers have already shifted
McKinsey’s latest data shows AI-powered search is now the most preferred digital information source.
Not emerging. Not soon-to-be. But, preferred.
It beats Google, beats social platforms, beats brand sites, beats review sites.
And it’s not just early-funnel stuff.
People are using AI for awareness, discovery, comparison, and late-stage decisions.
The entire buyer journey has bent toward AI.
2. AI pulls from totally different sources depending on your industry
Google’s AI Overviews don’t treat every category the same. The source mix shifts based on what’s available in that ecosystem:
CPG: pulls from affiliate blogs and user content.
Ecommerce: leans on brand and retailer sites.
Financial services: uses affiliate, news, research, and aggregators.
Telecom: leans on review sites and news coverage.
Whatever your industry’s “content soup” looks like… that’s what AI will spoon-feed consumers.
If your space is full of recycled comparison content, that’s what consumers see.
If the space has richer, more diverse sources, the answers might improve.
3. I ran my own tests
To see this firsthand, I ran two very different queries inside Claude.
Query #1: “Which CEO network should I join?”
Query #2: “What life insurance should I buy?”
The results couldn’t have been more different.
CEO networks:
Almost entirely first-party company content
~40% came from founder blogs, testimonials, or company-published material
Almost no independent reviews or deep dives
The whole narrative is shaped by what these companies say about themselves
Life insurance:
Same five or six finance sites dominating everything
Same rating criteria used across the board (AM Best, JD Power, NAIC)
Some outdated data
No originality, zero nuance, totally uniform
Two industries. Two completely different ecosystems. And they matched McKinsey’s findings perfectly.
If you want the full breakdown
I wrote a full blog post that shows the side-by-side category differences, the exact source lists, and a simple six-part checklist to prep your company for the shift toward AI search.
// Subscribe to The Hustle
Yes, I used to be the CEO. No, that’s not why I’m telling you to subscribe. I’m telling you because it’s still one of the only business newsletters that doesn’t make you want to fake a Wi-Fi outage.
It’s a quick, 5-minute hit of tech, trends, and growth stories that actually matter — the stuff smart operators skim in the morning and then pretend they knew all along.
1.5M+ people already read it. Join them and get it free right here.
A few Jawns to Check Out
Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.
Founders are talking a lot about Krisp, and the obvious thing is that they’re using it to tweak accents in call centers. That’s… a whole conversation. But purely on tech, it looks really impressive. It makes your voice sound steady and clear no matter where you are: kitchen, airport gate, chaos. Check out the YouTube demo out here.
Nate Silver has a great piece breaking down why NFL final scores have gotten so weird. Rule tweaks, longer field goals, smarter 4th-down calls, QBs running more, and the explosion of 2-point attempts have pushed the league into what he calls the “Scorigami Era.”
If you’re a football person or a stats person, it’s a fun breakdown of how small strategy changes can reshape an entire sport. Check it out here.
Everyone keeps saying the kids are cooked: they’re lonely, social media obsessed, can’t buy houses, can’t get a job, can’t get married. Oy Vey. But here, Galloway actually ties all that to a real solution instead of just another melancholy rant: and the solution is national service . It’s one of the few pieces that doesn’t just diagnose the rot, but proposes a path out. Check it out here.
Was today’s newsletter helpful? Relevant? Totally off-base?
Lemme know, I read every single reply.
Hope everyone has a great weekend.
And until next time, thanks for reading.
Jordan
P.S. Wanna work on something? Got a pod or content idea? → Email me | Need 30–60 min of advice? → Book here | Want a coach in your corner? → More info
